Invitation to the Defense of Bahareh Zamani Hargalani

The Examination Panel is made up of: PhD. Dipl.-Des. Janine Jembere (chair), Prof. Dr. Ruth Sonderegger (supervisor 1), Prof. Dr. H.Y.M. Yolande Jansen (external appraiser, University of Amsterdam).

The defense will take place in English in room M13a at Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna.

Abstract

This dissertation develops the concept of subcutaneous activism to name forms of political agency that operate beneath the visibility privileged by modern Western political thought. Rather than equating politics with rupture, protest, or institutional transformation, it argues that endurance—sustained through ritual, memory, embodied practice, and ethical attach-ment—constitutes a distinct mode of resistance. The study revisits Michel Foucault’s notion of “political spirituality” through the lenses of Dariush Shayegan and Ranajit Guha. While Foucault illuminates the ethical force of revolt, his framework risks overstating unity and underestimating ideological capture and historical ambivalence. Shayegan diagnoses the epistemic fractures of postcolonial subjectivity, and Guha foregrounds the plurality and opacity of subaltern agency. Together, they expose the tension between ethical transfor-mation and material constraint. Re-reading the Iranian Revolution through this framework, the thesis argues that spiritual traditions function not merely as ideology or emancipation, but as ontological formations that sustain subjectivity under domination. Subcutaneous ac-tivism thus reframes resistance as the ongoing labor of staying—an embodied, ethical, and historically embedded practice of survival and meaning-making.

Short biography

Bahareh Zamani is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of postcolonial theory and cultural studies. Her research examines processes of subject formation, knowledge production, and power, with particular attention to resistance and situated forms of activism across cultural contexts. She has taught seminars on gender, secularism, and postcolonial theory at the Academy. Her work has appeared in Krisis, and Promedia. She is also involved in the research-based project Archiv des Zuhörens, whose outcomes is published as a book in October 2026.